Lay Leadership Summit

Every year our dis­trict spon­sors an event called The Lay Lead­er­ship Sum­mit. It’s a big con­fer­ence designed to help church vol­un­teers do their jobs bet­ter. There are about 50 learn­ing tracks (each with four work­shops) rang­ing from chil­dren’s min­istry to using the inter­net effec­tive­ly to using light­ing and sound sys­tems. We, of course, spon­sor a col­lege min­istry track.

I men­tion all this by way of intro­duc­tion to men­tion two peo­ple I inter­act­ed with this week­end: Dan Bet­zer and John Abela.

Dan Bet­zer is a leg­end in the Assem­blies of God–he’s an incred­i­ble speak­er, a mis­sions fanat­ic, and an extreme­ly suc­cess­ful pas­tor. He’s also a bit of a hero of mine (his wife, inci­den­tal­ly, blogs).

Any­way, I learned two things about him this week­end:
1) he once lost his min­is­te­r­i­al cre­den­tials for sev­en years for flout­ing the hier­ar­chy’s rules
2) he’s such an intro­vert that he keeps his office at 60 degrees so that peo­ple feel too chilly to hang around and chit-chat

For the record, he and I have nev­er had a con­ver­sa­tion. I gleaned one tid­bit from his ser­mon and anoth­er from a friend of his.

The sec­ond per­son I met was John Abela. John is a for­mer core mem­ber of the phpBB2 team and runs the most pop­u­lar con­glom­er­a­tion of Assem­blies of God web­sites in the world. I am told that his total band­width exceeds that of all the nation­al Assem­bly of God web­sites in every nation com­bined.

That tick­les me. Many of our lead­ers attempt to lead by lim­it­ing infor­ma­tion and don’t seem to real­ize that’s no longer pos­si­ble. John has effec­tive­ly done an end run on a ton of stu­pid rules in the Assem­blies of God and because he’s a layper­son no one can stop him–he’s got no cre­den­tials for them to revoke. I love it.

He men­tioned that he gets a phone call from some AG offi­cial or anoth­er about once a week ask­ing him to stop doing what he’s doing. Even allow­ing for con­ver­sa­tion­al hyper­bole, that sounds about right. He’s mak­ing peo­ple ner­vous enough that we’ve even had res­o­lu­tions at Gen­er­al Coun­cil prompt­ed by one of his sites.

Any­way, I just want­ed to say that I think John’s a cool guy and that he’s mak­ing our move­ment bet­ter by using the web to help peo­ple. Kudos to him.